#Third World Approaches to International Law

[diaryofaphilosopher]

What are the features, knowledges, values, representations, practices, infrastructures, institutions, and governance modes of a just world that fits within planetary boundaries? How can we imagine them in a way that acknowledges the deep entanglements between human and non-human worlds while addressing the ubiquity of entrenched asymmetrical power relations that structure global societies?

— Ivana Isailovic, "Introduction" in "Radical Imagining of ‘Just & Green’ Futures."

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[philosophika]

"It is not a coincidence that the legacy of five hundred years of settler colonialism, genocide, slavery, apartheid, and systemic racial discrimination is climate change, mass extinction, desertification, deforestation, and the increasing toxicity of the air, water, and land." ~Usha Natarajan

[siriusblack-the-third]

Matching Misfortunes: Edmund Pevensie

He's arguably my favourite character right alongside Caspian the Tenth. Let's hope I did his character justice. The other parts for the pevensies are up on my blog.

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Edmund stalks into the debate hall with his notes in his hands, and the room falls into a hush.

The students cease their muttering, their eyes tracking the lanky, too-thin boy as he walks with far too much grace for someone who is fifteen-almost-sixteen years old and has yet to get his final growth spurt.

His limbs are too long for his blazer-adorned torso and he is not yet old enough to put on muscle, and still he moves with thrice as much control and precision as the royalty of the country.

Edmund remembers the months After.

He remembers stumbling and falling and breaking bone because he was a twenty-nine year old man in the body of a ten year old child, falling till he got sick of it and asked Susan to help him learn how to walk again, remembers tear-soaked cheeks and trembling callous-less hands and bitten-off screams after being woken up by a nightmare in the middle of the night, feeling too thin, too short, too young, too weak, too cold Peter, please, it’s too cold, help me—

Never again, he had told himself.

He feels their stares settle over his strange unscarred skin like a layer of cold gel, and he ignores them in favour of holding his head high and walking towards the desk with his name tag on it. He relaxes into the seat as much as he can, back straight and shoulders pulled back and breathing even, and then moves his gaze to meet the eyes of everyone that is looking at him.

Most students hurriedly look away, flushes staining their cheeks bright red out of the embarrassment of getting caught staring so blatantly. A select few stare back, holding his gaze for a couple of seconds before they, too, lower their eyes and turn back to their conversation.

It both does and does not feel like the Royal Court that he once presided over.

There too, conversations used to stop when he entered the Throne Room. There, too, people used to follow him with their eyes as he moved towards his throne beside Peter’s. There, too, he used to keep his back straight and roll his shoulders back and breathe evenly to prepare himself for the approaching war of words that he was certain he would win.

He lounges in his seat like he’s lounging in his throne, and watches the faculty walk into the room and take their seats. He does not bother to stand up like the rest of the students do, and ignores the disapproving looks Professor Jasmine throws at him for his supposed insolence.

What do they know of debates, he thinks with a hidden sneer.

He was the one that sat with bloodthirsty Kings and Warlords, manipulative Queens and Bandit Chiefs, and aided his older sister in hammering out treaties and ceasefires and surrenders from their enemies’ lips without having to lift a sword. He wrote the laws for his world and presided over the Supreme Court of Justice of his kingdom, solved internal disputes and planned war strategies and invented new tactics for external conflicts. He was renowned for his excellence with double swords and double-edged words alike, in Narnia.

In Narnia, he was King Edmund the Just, the Serpent Tongued Diplomat King, Third of the Beloved Four, Representative of the People.

Here in post War England, he is just Edmund Pevensie, with sharp glares and sharper words, as dangerous with his tongue as his older brother was with his fists and his older sister with her smiles.

Unlike Peter who swings between two worlds without control over his thoughts and memories, and Susan who tries (and fails miserably) to not think about their world at all, it is comparatively easy for Edmund to maintain the two different worlds as different experiences. For him, Narnia exists in one part of his mind and England in the other— separated from each other by a solid stone wall that Edmund has built up and strengthened over the five and a half years that have passed since he and the others fell out of that thrice-damned wardrobe, in bodies that were no longer theirs.

And yet, his nail beds itch.

He remembers the feel of digging his nails into flesh, remembers the feel of blood welling up under his fingers as he dug deeper, remembers the feel of being older, taller, stronger, wiser. He remembers being powerful.

Around him, the debate competition begins. He dimly registers the names of the students from the seventeen participating schools as they are introduced, and recognises more than half of them.

He treats debate competitions in schools just as he did political meets back when he used to be King. There are always three things one must know— the topic that you are to speak on, the questions that you may be asked, and the people who will be attending. About the people, you must know their agendas, their strengths and their weaknesses, and how to use that to gain what you desire. As simple, and as difficult, as that.

Here, he recognises twelve out of the seventeen opponents, and feels his lips curve into a small smirk. The participants seated on either side of him lean away from him, and it only makes his smirk grow wider with vindication.

He misses attending and holding Court. He misses the gratification in verbally ripping apart nobles and bloodthirsty warlords alike, he misses the satisfaction he felt while sinking his two swords into flesh on the battlefield in case the peace talks went wrong.

He misses being covered in blood after a victory, misses the annual Royal debate competitions, the mock arguments he had with Susan and the members of the Royal Court of Narnia, the vindictive smugness he felt when he put the fear of the Narnian Royalty in the hearts of warlords seeking to destroy his kingdom with nothing but his words and occasionally his swords.

Here, Edmund has to remind himself that he is arguing with children.

He has to remind himself that the people he is debating with are not warlords and power-hungry rulers out to conquer his kingdom.

He has to remind himself to not turn into the Serpent Tongued Diplomat King, to keep that vicious and twisted part of him safely locked up in the Narnian part of his memories. He has to keep the whole of his true self at bay, because he knows that they will not understand his metaphorical bloodlust when it comes to the art of wordplay.

He knows that they will not understand what it is like, to be an adult in a child’s body forced to play pretend politics where he has no real influence on the country’s government.

However, he thinks as the debate competition commences and a girl in a smart navy blue suit walks onto stage and starts giving her speech, he can allow certain attributes from his Kingly self through into his teenage self. In controlled amounts, he can allow himself a little ruthlessness, a little edge to his words, a little confidence, a little dignity and grace.

He can allow himself to indulge a little, to employ a few of his Kingly attributes into his teenage identity so he can get through secondary school without being given as hard a time as normal teenagers are.

That is one benefit of having been King— he might not have grown up in this world, but he had grown up before. As uncomfortable it was to grow up again, he knows what to expect this time.

He is better prepared than he was last time.

He leans forward and notes down a question for a statement the girl makes, and he feels the stares of the students on his back again. The vindication rises in his body; he is a force to be reckoned with and his opponents know it, and Edmund revels in the effect he has on them, revels in the way they cannot meet his eyes properly without having to look down. It almost feels like he is King again and they are his enemies— forced to bow to him after being defeated time and again, forced to grudgingly admit that he is superior to them.

The debate progresses, he gives his speech, gets asked questions and answers them as best as he can. He scratches his itching nails over his palms as he listens to the rest of their speeches and asks them questions, and sits back with his dissatisfaction very visible on his face when he does not receive the answers he was hoping for.

In the end, he lifts the trophy up with fingers that despair for the feel of his swords gripped in them, a satisfied gleam in his piercing blue eyes and a badge that proclaims him as the first ranker pinned to the front of his school blazer.

Dozens of eyes follow him as he steps off the stage and strides out of the room, and he lets them settle on his proud shoulders. Lets them turn into the weight he once carried in the form of a silver crown.

Let them see, he thinks viciously. His nails itch, and he wishes to sink them into flesh and rip it apart. He wishes to drench himself in the blood of his enemies.

Let them be witness to merely a fraction of the power I used to possess. Let them understand that I am dangerous, and not to be underestimated. Let them see that I am not a mere child.

He is a boy, arguing politics, modern and ancient war tactics and ethics with professors in his free time, having rumours of being a genius follow him around like obedient dogs at their master’s heels.

He is a King, shackled and hidden in the corner of a mind that belongs to a too-lanky teenage boy halfway through puberty.

He refuses to reach too deep into the memories. He refuses to forget the memories. He refuses to let himself sink into his own mind. He refuses to forget himself, and he refuses to be his entire self.

He cannot. He will not.

[mariacallous]

Earlier this year, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive actions that could set the country back decades on ocean protection—reopening the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing and undoing all the progress that has been made to end overfishing and rebuild fish stocks and the United States’ fisheries. Going further than any previous administration, he also issued an executive order in April that seeks to fast-track the launch of deep-sea mining in domestic and international waters.

Yet Trump’s retreat from international forums and multilateral institutions has created a vacuum that other countries have been quick to fill. For instance, the third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC) last month delivered real progress and momentum on several critical issues at a pivotal time.

It’s tempting to be cynical about the impact of slow-moving U.N. bodies, and UNOC was by no means perfect. But its celebration of multilateralism offered a clear-headed rebuke to the approach being taken by the Trump administration, which didn’t bother to show up at all—at least, not officially. And as the world prepares for the final round of negotiations for the Global Plastics Treaty in August in Geneva, there’s another opportunity for countries to push forward with or without the cooperation of the United States.

Let’s be clear: Trump’s executive orders on the environment pose a real problem—and not just for those who care about protecting the ocean, one of our planet’s last remaining global commons.

Prioritizing corporate profit over the long-term health of this vital resource may appease shortsighted lobbyists, but deregulation will ultimately destroy the ocean that we all depend on for a livable planet. That’s also, incidentally, bad for business. Trump’s attempt to circumvent international law may not be shocking from someone who pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on his first day back in office, but it is yet another attempt to pander to his base that will ultimately undermine U.S. interests and standing.

At the top of the agenda at UNOC was the issue of deep-sea mining. While the United States’ absence was certainly noted, it was Trump’s April executive order on deep-sea mining that appalled nearly everyone present. The meeting proved to be a big moment for efforts to counteract this action, with Slovenia, the Marshall Islands, Cyprus, and Latvia joining a growing list of countries publicly calling for a moratorium or precautionary pause on such mining.

As attention shifts to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) meeting now underway in Jamaica, states will consider adopting a moratorium or some sort of precautionary pause on deep-sea mining in the high seas. The approach recently announced by Trump will definitely be a part of the conversations—but the fact that there are now 37 states on record opposed to rushing ahead with a new code that would permit such mining makes it very unlikely that it will be allowed in international waters any time soon. In a world that is reeling from the combined impacts of climate change, plastic pollution, industrial fisheries, deforestation, and war, this is not the time to optionally launch a new destructive and unnecessary industry.

It’s also not clear how feasible Trump’s deep-sea mining executive order even is in practice. On April 24, the president had ordered the secretary of commerce to “expedite the process for reviewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits in areas beyond national jurisdiction under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act.” Using this act—a 1980 law intended to be a stopgap measure until the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea entered into force—as a vehicle to bypass international law is likely to prompt multiple lawsuits if any mining is actually permitted or ever takes place.

In the absence of an ISA framework,  any minerals obtained from areas beyond national jurisdiction under Trump’s executive order would likely be illegal to export for sale or processing. This would significantly limit their potential value, adding even greater challenges for a venture that already appears likely to be too expensive to be commercially viable without major public subsidies.

Bypassing the ISA, which was established by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), could have far-reaching consequences for the United States. Despite failing to ratify UNCLOS, the United States benefits from the treaty in many ways. From shipping and commerce to science and military uses, UNCLOS provides a global framework for how states operate on 71 percent of the earth’s surface.

UNCLOS has territorial implications as well, both designating areas up to 200 nautical miles from land as states’ exclusive economic zones and providing a means to expand these areas through extended continental shelf claims. Trump’s deep-sea mining executive order has already drawn strong criticism from several states, and it may well lead to more significant problems for U.S. interests on the high seas.

Beyond the ISA, the international community is looking to negotiations on the Global Plastics Treaty. A lot is at stake, as plastics are now understood not just to be a serious threat to marine life but also to biodiversity, human health, and environmental justice. While it is not clear if and how the United States will participate in these negotiations, all signs point to Washington retreating from global leadership in these spaces as well.

Even so, with 19 new countries ratifying the Global Ocean Treaty at UNOC, it is likely that we will reach the necessary 60 in time for the U.N. General Assembly in September.

Ultimately, Trump’s brand of isolationism and exceptionalism will be outlasted by the multilateral agreements made in the coming months—which will present new opportunities for leadership from China, India, and Brazil, as well as regional blocs such as the European Union, Pacific Small Island Developing States, and the African Group.

It is important for the international community to make decisions that are in line with what the best available science tells us is necessary—and in line with what justice demands. This is no time to allow outliers to drive unacceptable compromises or unending delays that prevent the majority of governments from doing the urgent work of protecting people and our planet. The United States and other holdouts will catch up eventually.

[whencyclopedia]

Indigenous Intercultural Health in Chile

Since the return to democracy in Chile in 1990 CE, the new governments have dealt with one of the great historical debts of the Chilean state, its relationship with the indigenous peoples. These peoples have been historically marginalized and made invisible in all spheres. However, with the revaluation of their cultural heritage, indigenous medicine and the use of elements of nature and medicinal herbs - wisdom accumulated for centuries - re-emerges. Through the Special Program of Health and Indigenous Peoples (PESPI by its Spanish acronym, Programa Especial de Salud y Pueblos Indígenas), present in almost all health services in Chile, indigenous medicine has become available for the whole population as a valued alternative within the official medical system. This programme promotes complementarity between the conventional and indigenous medical systems, incorporating intercultural medical assistance in hospital and primary care facilities.

Traditional Mapuche Health

The PESPI programme promotes the indigenous health of each of the peoples recognized by the Chilean State (Chile recognizes 9 indigenous peoples) and the complementarity with the official medical system. The public health strategy is to establish a link between the hegemonic medical system and the alternative one, reinforced and supported by the recommendations of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO):

This perspective assumes, therefore, that medical systems alone are not sufficient to meet the health demands of an indigenous population, both in their conceptions of health and disease and in the way they carry out healing. (Manriquez-Hizaut et al., 760)

The Mapuche people are the most numerous and have the greatest presence in the urban context, particularly in Santiago where nearly a third of Chile's indigenous population lives. Their conception of illness and health is quite different from the one we know today, and this diverse view has generated interest not only among the Chilean indigenous population who value this ancestral wisdom but also among the non-indigenous population and the health teams in care facilities.

Mapuche medicine understands health as a balance basically in two areas. Firstly, the person is conceived as an "open body", as opposed to the modern view of a closed and divided body (inaugurated with Descartes): "The integrative conception of the body or "open body" leads its people to live illness and health as states of the body in relation to its social environment: "wezafelen" or being bad and "kumel kalen" or being good" (Solar, 2005, 2).

The idea of kumel kalen or küme mongen (to be well, to live well) is also present in other Latin American cultures under the concepts of Sumak Kawsay in Quechua or Suma Qamaña in Aymara for example. The illness is then understood as a lack of respect or imbalance of the individual with its environment. This can happen through the transgression of laws, rites, or the forbidden. In this way, "the evil is not the disease, but the cause that produced it and thus considers the disease not as an evil, but as a reaction to the evil" (Solar, 4).

Secondly, the Mapuche worldview sees the universe or the whole as a unit made up of opposite and complementary poles. Likewise, health (Konalen) and illness (Kutran) are in constant tension, making it impossible to see the body as an isolated unit, but rather as an open entity that reflects the tensions and balance of the world. Thus, in order to incorporate the indigenous approach to the traditional health system, the only way is to talk about complementarity, that is, a relationship that allows health teams to get closer to indigenous medicine specialists (machi or lawentuchefe), that allows for the derivation and exchange of knowledge when necessary.

Continue reading...

[carletes]

I went to an international lawyers conference and I met so many ppl whose work I’ve cited and a GIANT in the third world approaches to international law field told me my research was important 😭😭😭

[brookspayrolleor]

Top PEO Service Providers in India: Why Brookspayroll Leads the Way

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[myguidingmoon-light]

Rajieen, Returning

I've decided to try posting my Imago Palestina project here on Tumblr! I enjoy reading longer stuff here, so I figured others might too. If people like it, I'll keep it up! This post is a few weeks old (Feb 2, 2025) but it feels like a good starting place. If you want to see the newest stuff right now, or get it in your inbox when I post, go to ImagoPalestina.Substack.com!

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“Lift up your eyes and look around: They all gather and come to you; your sons will come from afar, and your daughters will be carried on the arm.

They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.” (Isaiah 60:4 & 61:4)

I hope you’ve seen some of the videos coming out of Gaza this last week. Images of corridors of people, not pushed from behind by tanks but marching confidently back along the sea to their homes. Tears shed not in mourning but in pure, unbridlable joy, as family, friends, and neighbours who haven’t seen each other in up to fifteen months—many who thought they may never see each other again—cling to each other like a prayer to never be separated. The captives finally set free of their chains, met with shouts of joy by the communities and loved ones that had so long felt their absence.

Even in cases like that last one, where the Israeli government specifically refused to allow freed Palestinian captives any “public displays of joy,” there’s only so much you can do to stop a wave of joy this powerful, this genuine, and this widely spread through empathetic neighbours throughout the world.

Palestinian joy is a beautiful thing.

In the past week, with the first phase of this very fragile ceasefire already approaching one third completion, our neighbours who had been displaced to the south of Gaza have finally begun the journeys back to their homes—and to whatever they may find there. This hasn’t been easy, quick, or safe. Travel is hard enough already for everyone, as vehicles beyond animal-drawn wagons are virtually nonexistent, but for the hundreds of thousands of injured, disabled, and elderly Gazans, the trek is especially an ordeal. Israel still maintains a military presence on the Netzarim corridor separating Gaza’s north and south, meaning that the thousands of people returning to the north have to wait to pass through what is now the biggest checkpoint in occupied Palestine. While the five hundred thousand strong crowd of displaced Gazans is now finally moving through this checkpoint, the week began with Israeli soldiers opening fire multiple on returning Palestinians, killing two and wounding nine others.

And still, for many, this return serves as only a foretaste of the feast yet to come.

I began this project by sharing the story of Isam Hamad, a Palestinian organizer who helped start the Great March of Return in 2018. For those of you who haven’t heard Isam’s story (I’d urge you to check it out), this peaceful protest was, for Isam, a manifestation of one of the Palestinian people’s core demands: let us go home. It’s a demand that is enshrined in international law—UN resolution 194 states that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date”—but, to me, it’s also just something that is fundamentally understandable, isn’t it?

For us Christians, ‘return’ is something that is inseparably woven through so much of our theology, our upbringing, and the stories we tell to each other and about each other. Some would argue that the central pillar of the Christian faith is of returning to a right relationship with God, and of realizing that it’s never too late to return. But beyond that, in more tangible ways, our scriptures are full of real hopes, doubts, fears, and promises about returning. This we share with our Jewish siblings, as so much of the Jewish writing that became our Old Testament and influenced our founding apostles (and Christ himself) was written in and about the process of returning from exile. We probably wouldn’t have the Bible at all if faithful Jews exiled to Babylon didn’t dream of returning home and want to make those dreams tangible.

I quoted one of these tangible dreams at the outset of this message because I think it’s an irresistible image of hope for this moment, and because it so beautifully lays plain the connections between us and our neighbours today and our ancestors two and half thousand years ago. My critics will say that I’m taking those verses out of context, that these promises were for the restoration of Israel, and perhaps even argue that this 76 year colonial project is the realization of this return. But I’d challenge them to reconsider what context really means.

When the prophet, in the voice of God, addresses Israel, he’s not talking to a modern nation state—known in Hebrew as Medinat Israel—but rather, the members of his community whose faith and identity was being forged and reforged in the crucible of exile—Am Yisrael. To me, the context that’s most relevant is these experiences, shared across centuries, and the way we believe God shows up for those pushed to the margins. As a Christian, I am not ashamed of believing that God’s people includes all people, and that God’s redemptive power is most often shown in the poor, the chained, and the oppressed—just as Christ himself did when he read from this same text to his own community.

In response to Zionist narratives, built on interpretations of these same Biblical prophesies, of a return which demands exclusivity and ethnic cleansing, we need to insist wholeheartedly on God’s promises of compassion, not conquest, new life, not suffocation—and that these promises are for all his people. The book of Isaiah is a call to remember the responsibility of living in community together, the consequences for choosing power, wealth, and self-interest over the love of neighbour and care for the oppressed, and the need for justice to return just as the prophet envisions people returning to their lands. Some 2500 years removed, God still walks with those who wander in exile, who long for restoration, and who nonetheless prepare to return to ruined cities.

It’s for this reason that I, once again, hope you’ve seen some of the videos coming out of Gaza this week. Images of land as far as the eye can see—basically all of Rafah, once Biden’s “red line”—reduced to rubble. Tears of disappointment and disorientation as our neighbours return to find a heap of garbage where their beloved home once stood, or the graveyard where they buried their mother and grandmother completely bulldozed. The wailing and lament for 15-year old Zakaria Humaid Yahya Barbakh who was shot multiple times by an Israeli sniper (who also fired on the man who dove in to rescue Zakaria) on the second day of the ceasefire.

We need to celebrate the joy of return, but we shouldn’t sugar-coat it. This is not the return that Isam marched for or our Palestinian neighbours in the diaspora pray for. This is a return, back into the wreckage of genocide, under the thumb of occupation, within a fragile truce which may still not last more than a few more weeks. I wonder if our neighbours embracing each other at the central checkpoint held so tight because they don’t know how long they’ll be able to hold on this time.

And yet, with our ancestors returning from exile in Babylon, and our church mothers and fathers who laboured to build a kingdom community worthy of Christ’s return, I have faith in what this foretaste promises. Taste and see with all of your senses, but don’t be satisfied yet. It’s our job to march confidently along the sea together, sure of our destination, and working to sew seeds of liberation every step of the way.

“He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign LORD, you alone know.” (Ezekiel 37:3)

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Prayer Requests

With your heart: Pray for our neighbours as they return to their homes. Pray that they would find safety along the route, and that the weight of their journey would be eased. Pray that they find comfort waiting for them. Pray that if they don’t, they would rebuild their ruined cities and live in them, that they would grow new vineyards and taste the fruit of new gardens. Pray that this foretaste would restore their strength and that the feast would be right around the corner.

With your voice: Use CJPME’s email tool to tell the Ontario Government to dismantle the shadowy and deceptively-named “Hate Crimes Working Group,” which works to silence voices against Israeli genocide. Find more info here

With your hands: Make a donation to The Sameer Project to support our neighbours as they return to uncertain circumstances

More Information

Watch the compilation of videos of our neighbours’ tearful reunions that I referenced to draw today’s illustration

Rajieen, which means “returning,” has long been a rallying cry for Palestinians. Here are a couple resources I wasn’t able to reference in the post:

““We Are Returning”: An Anthem for Palestinian Liberation” by Maha Nassar at the Critical Inquiry Blog

Palestinian activists from Maryland perform the Chant of Return

Some messages from our neighbours about this return:

Bisan finally returns to her house

Gaza Soup Kitchen brings chef Mahmoud’s remains to his family cemetery, only to destroyed

The Sameer Project reports on the new situation in North Gaza and Gaza City

Rabie documents the journey back home

Ahmed the Little Farmer documents the journey back home

“Israel wants no celebrations when Palestinian prisoners freed in Gaza deal” at The New Arab

Video from Bisan Owda as she approaches the Netzarim checkpoint

Video from UN OCHA showing the crowd of Gazans waiting at the Netzarim checkpoint

“‘I’d crawl if I have to’: Palestinians eager to return to northern Gaza” at Al Jazeera

"Isam Hamad” at Imago Palestina

“The 3 Israels” at Jewitches

“Resolution 194” at UNRWA.org

“All That Remains” infographic at Humaniti Project

“Drone footage shows the scale of destruction in Gaza's Rafah – video” at the Guardian

“‘My neighborhood was one of the most beautiful in Gaza. All that’s left is rubble’” at +972 Magazine

“Israeli sniper kills Palestinian boy in Gaza on second day of ceasefire” at Middle East Monitor

[crooked-wasteland]

What's the point of making Ozzie a demon if he's not going to be evil, dangerous and deadly like demons are supposed to be? Vivziepop sucks at making demon characters.not only do her characters look nothing like demons and now they don't act like ones??? Hazbin Hotel is doomed,might as well make Hazbin a preschool show at this point.its also embarrassing that the king of hell (Lucifer) is just Stolas 2.0 from reading the leaked scripts.Id like to add more but im far too tired because this is getting absurdly painful.

I think there is valid criticism in this critique, but I also feel that, in a way, it is rather exaggerated outrage.

When it comes to demons behaving any specific way, that mainly comes down to poor world building. Spindlehorse has done very little to actually dictate how this world of hers works, and many times, it appears she actively contradicts values previously assumed.

Are there vastly different laws and social expectations between rings?

Loo Loo Land, and once again in Oops, Greed is shown to have an extremely lax approach to crimes of violence.

However, in Harvest Moon, having previously killed people results in Millie being banned from participating in the episode.

Stolas being in public with Blitz gets no notice or response of attention in Harvest Moon and again later in Ozzie's. But then the internal logic contradicts that same episode with Walley acting like it is actually a huge deal. And then for a third time the series presents an about face with Beelzebub dating Tex as if there is nothing special going on there.

Stolas cheats, but he is not wrong for that, which makes it not a flaw.

Then, the world building tries to reinforce the idea that this relationship would be a problem by trying to highlight a demon racial and status divide in Western Energy. Only for Queen Bee and Oops to backtrack again and make it extremely normalized with Beelzebub dating a common Hell Hound and Asmodeus' conflict not being about who he is dating, but the act of dating in the first place.

Going into the idea of "good" and "evil," I don't really think that is a good argument to make. There has to be some sense of conflict for a story to maintain interest, and if the idea of "evil" is the norm was played to a logical conclusion, it would feel more like a joke than anything else. Like in Good Omens, where Hell is dictated by doing the worst thing possible and anything that produces a moral positive is bad. It would completely isolate the audience from the values of the cast, which is why Crowley is depicted as having a personality and values more aligned to humans. As such, it doesn't feel like a good faith platform to stand on when criticizing the show.

What I will say is fair, however, is that Medrano has achieved an Olympic medal in trying to make her characters entirely flawless. There is no consistent character flaw that any of her cast maintains out of what is deemed necessary by the plot or depicted as not a flaw by context.

Asmodeus is quite literally perfect for Vivienne's standards. His whole life revolves around his partner, and he is willing to do whatever it takes for that partner, including murder. But that is good, actually.

Blitz is inconsistently too insecure in his relationships. He's insecure when it comes to FizzaRolli and Stolas, resulting in him burning down his own family home and violently rejecting Stolas after the night at Ozzie's. But he's so secure in other relationships that: (1) despite knowing Barbie doesn't want to see him, he tracks her down, (2) he is overbearing of Loona despite feeling like she hates him, (3) abuses Moxxie, despite having issues with losing people.

And I think that's what this criticism is actually addressing. A lack of understanding the stakes and values the world plays on while simultaneously being handed characters who are so volatile in their own values every time we see them that it is pretty much impossible to defer those values passively.

[beardedmrbean]

A Yale University Law School associate research scholar was terminated after failing to disclose information about her alleged ties to Samidoun Network, a Canada-based group designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.

Iranian-born Helyeh Doutaghi was fired Friday, three weeks after being put on administrative leave after allegations were made that she was part of the Samidoun Network, classified as "a sham charity" by the federal government for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S-designated terrorist organization.

"Over the last three weeks, Yale has repeatedly requested to meet with Ms. Doutaghi and her attorney to obtain clarifying information and resolve this matter," Yale spokesperson Alden Ferro said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. "Unfortunately, she has refused to meet to provide any responses to critical questions, including whether she has ever engaged in prohibited activity with organizations or individuals that were placed on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list ('SDN List')."

As such, the university terminated Doutaghi, effective immediately, over her "refusal to cooperate" with their investigation. The university, which saw its fair share of anti-Israel protests last year and a large-scale graduation walkout, noted her short-term employment was already set to expire in April. 

Doutaghi was appointed deputy director of the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project at the unversity in October 2023. According to her bio on the Palestine Center for Public Policy website, her "research explores the intersections of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), encompassing Marxian and postcolonial critiques of law, sanctions, and international political economy."

She is also an incoming post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tehran, according to the website, where her focus will be "completing her manuscript on Iranian sanctions regime and neoliberalism."

The allegations about Doutaghi were first made by Jewish Onliner, a Substack "Empowered by A.I. capabilities," according to its X account.

"Rather than defend me, the Yale Law School moved within less than 24 hours of learning about the report to place me on leave," Doutaghi wrote in a statement on X earlier this month. "I was given only a few hours’ notice by the administration to attend an interrogation based on far-right AI-generated allegations against me, while enduring a flood of online harassment, death threats, and abuse by Zionist trolls, exacerbating ongoing unprecedented distress and complications both at work and at home."

Doutaghi said she was "afforded no due process and no reasonable time to consult" with her attorney.

The termination of Doutaghi comes as the Trump administration has been clamping down on allegations of antisemitism across Ivy League schools. 

Several students holding visas or green cards have since filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, alleging First Amendment violations.

"Immediate action will be taken by the Department of Justice to protect law and order, quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities," a White House fact sheet on the executive order said. 

Trump also vowed to deport Hamas sympathizers and revoke student visas. 

Columbia University student and anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil was among the first students to face allegations from the Trump administration over his green card application, in which he was accused of omitting details about his employment history.

The administration subsequently pulled $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University, citing its handling of anti-Israel protests on campus last year. The Ivy League school announced on Friday it would implement significant policy changes to comply with the administration's demands.

[girlactionfigure]

*ISRAEL REALTIME* - "Connecting the World to Israel in Realtime"

HAPPY CHANUKAH !!! Chanukah night 7 TONIGHT 🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎

◾️MORE SHIP ATTACKS BY THE HOUTHIS… a Marshall islands-flagged chemical tanker reported an "exchange of fire" with a speedboat 55 nautical miles (around 102 kilometres) off Yemen.  A speedboat with armed men aboard approached two vessels transiting off the coast of Yemen's Red Sea port of Hodeidah.  (AP) the Houthis launched two missiles at a commercial ship in the Bab al-Mandab Strait but missed, according to US officials. An American vessel intercepted another drone launched by the Houthis. (The ship that the Houthis tried to hit is the Ardmore Encounter tanker that carries the flag of the Marshall Islands.

Also reports of a shipping attack on the other Yemen coast near Oman.  Quickly becoming a major disruption to world shipping.

◾️THE TOLL… we previously reported on 8 lost in battle, two more are reported killed yesterday as well - the worst day since the first day of the war.  https://www.timesofisrael.com/ten-soldiers-including-two-senior-officers-killed-in-gaza-fighting-and-deadly-ambush/

◾️JENIN… (Arab city, West Bank, terror center)  Firefights with IDF forces still going on, day and half continuous.

◾️FALSE ALERT - MODI’IN MACCABIM REUT… siren alert malfunction.  Homefront Command is working to fix.

◾️INCREASING RESERVE AGE… the Ministry of Defense distributed a memorandum of law to increase the exemption age from reserve service to be raised in order to prevent damage to the IDF's combat capability in the midst of war. According to the plan, the exemption age will be increased by one year for regular soldiers, officers and certain positions. 

◾️GAZA, WEAPONS EVERYWHERE (no innocent / civilian spaces)… Lt. Col. Oz, Nahal's 931st Brigade: We entered about 500 houses in Jabaliya. In 90% of them we found weapons, inside wardrobes, in the kitchen, in UNWRA sacks and under babies' beds. There were grenades, weapons, guns, rifles, RPGs and many other weapons.  We arrived at the mosque, which apparently looked innocent. When we broke the door on the third floor, we were surprised to discover an advanced combat space there: they built a training facility there, like we train in the bases, they managed to build it in the mosque! We killed more than ten terrorists there.

◾️SOLDIERS MOTHER’S SAY… ( https://m.facebook.com/Mothers.Soldier ) "Our sons in battle, not Biden's son or Blinken's son - our soldier's life comes before the enemy's citizens.”  Ilanit Dedosh, mother of a commander in Golani "Don't be influenced by foreign considerations - bomb from above.” 

“We are in the most just war, against a cruel enemy who slaughtered, raped, massacred babies, women and hundreds of our brothers and sisters. We must trample him, and kill them to the last - and not stop until victory! We call on the IDF and the government - do not endanger our soldiers without a real operational need, do not put before your eyes any other consideration, not legal, not humanitarian or international pressure, Our sons are the ones in battle, not Biden's son nor Blinken's son, tell everyone in a clear voice - the lives of our soldiers come before the citizens of the enemy. We as mothers will not accept any risk to our soldiers that is not from operational considerations only. Loving, trusting, and strong - we are behind you! Fight until victory!" added the mothers.  “You promised that you would not surrender and that you would not change the plan of action, do not endanger fighters in vain!”

[male-to-less-male-derogatory]

The #imperialism posts saying "Trump is fucking up the tools of US imperialism lol" have a point.

Where they overstate their case is attributing it to "not understanding anything". I understand that the current admin is incompetent, but this hasn't come out of nowhere and it does not take a grand plan.

The US right wing narrative since the Clinton administration has been a rejection of multilateralism, international consensus-seeking, and coalition-building.

Connotations of "equality" or "inclusivity" does not stop these from being key components in the form of imperialism contemporary Marxists describe in neoliberalism.

Whether US airstrikes in Kosovo would reduce or worsen ethnic cleansing of Armenians was not an important point of contention to the American right, nor was it which international partners called for or opposed the move. The important question was how much the airstrikes would cost and who was paying for it. The suggestion of concomitant benefits from 'trust among allies' or some 'rules-based international order' isn't something the GOP is unable to grasp, it is what they picture when you say 'imperialism'. The 'New World Order'. The 'Deep State'. An international consensus that has consistently ridiculed and rejected Republican politics as irrational, unprofitable, and unprincipled.

...and thus:

The Trump administration's international approach places strict bilateral transactions as the proper unit foreign policy is to be judged on. This is based on long, long-standing view of military support as a commodity the US was selectively 'selling' for free, as if exploiting US labour to maintain a monopoly - in the extreme of this view, any form of international law is a collusion towards anti-competitive business practices.

You can call this wrong (I sure do), you can call this stupid and immoral, but it is not just some individual eccentricity borne from late-imperial decay, and fascists don't identify with the establishment enough for it to be 'self-destructive' to them.

The state of their country is broken to them. There's some third definition of (Cold War era?) American Empire they are trying to revive.

Meanwhile, the world jeers at them and the British are just nodding in a corner like "yeah this is why you gotta grieve loss of your Empire properly. They've been taking it really hard since the US stopped being an empire and became a regular country. You know, sometime around WW1."

[transmisible]

Joan Gordon

Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville

China Miéville was born on September 6, 1972, in Norwich, England, but has spent most of his life in London. King Rat (1998), his first novel, is a coming-of-age fantasy incorporating folk tales and drum’n’bass music into an action-packed quest. His second novel, Perdido Street Station (2000), which he wrote while working on his PhD, received a great deal of critical attention, winning both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award, and being short-listed for the World Fantasy Award. The Scar (2002), his third novel, also very well received, is a stand-alone sequel to Perdido Street Station, taking place in the same world but with different characters. Miéville is working on a third stand-alone novel set in that world. He has published several short stories and novellas, and is presently an editor of Historical Materialism, serving as special editor of a recent issue on Marxism and Fantasy (10.4 [2002]). In May 2003, he was Guest of Honor, along with Carol Emshwiller, at WisCon, the feminist sf convention. A committed Marxist, he ran for British Parliament in 2001 as the Socialist Alliance candidate. The photo of him that appears on both Perdido Street Station and The Scar fairly represents his strong physical presence—tall, muscular, and brooding. The man himself, however, is soft-spoken, humorous, and self-deprecating. The interview which follows is based on an email dialogue conducted between March 2002 and August 2003. It represents the current interests of a writer already accomplished but still near the beginning of his career.

Joan Gordon: Would you describe your childhood and education?

China Miéville: There were three of us in my family: my mum, my sister Jemima, and me, a close-knit single-parent family. I met my father maybe four times, but never really knew him, and he died about 8 years ago. We lived in north-west London, in a working-class, ethnically-mixed area called Willesden (where King Rat opens).

My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached “China,” thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that “china” is Cockney rhyming slang for “mate.” People say “my old china,” meaning “my old mate,” because “china plate” rhymes with “mate.”

We used to go to a lot of museums and art galleries, and we used to watch an awful lot of TV. We were pretty poor (my mother trained to be a teacher, which even when she qualified didn’t mean a whole lot of money), but from the age of eleven, I went to private school on scholarships. I had a great childhood. I was a bit of a geek and a bit anxious, but I had plenty of friends and interests, mostly sf-related-RPGs [role-playing games], reading, drawing, writing—and later, politics.

When I was 16 I went to boarding school for two years, which I loathed. I went to Cambridge University [in 1991] to read English, but quickly changed to Social Anthropology, receiving my degree in 1994. Then I worked for a while as sub-editor on a computer magazine, did a Masters in International Law from the London School of Economics (receiving the degree in 1995), spent a year at Harvard, and then received a PhD in Philosophy of International Law in 2001.

My dissertation is entitled A Historical Materialist Analysis of International Law and the Legal Form. It’s a critical history and theory of international law, drawing extensively on the work of the Russian legal theorist Yevgeny Pashukanis. Its direct influence on my novels has been very slight. There’s a reference to jurisprudence in Perdido Street Station which is drawn from it, and there’s something about a form of maritime law in The Scar, but that’s about it. The thesis is really an expression of a much broader theoretical interest and approach, which in turn informs the fiction, so to that extent, they’re both infused with a shared outlook.

JG: What cultural influences shaped your writing?

CM: My sister and I watched a hell of a lot of TV, which is partly why I don’t buy the argument that it stultifies children’s imaginations—I think it depends almost entirely on the context in which you’re watching it. British children’s TV in the 1970s and early 1980s was extremely good, and these days I often realize that something I’m writing is a riff from that early viewing. Programs I remember vividly include Doctor Who [1963-89], Chorlton and the Wheelies [1976-79], Blake’s 7 [1978-81], and Battle of the Planets [1978-79]. These days I’m a flat-out, awe-struck fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997-2003].

We didn’t see many films when I was young, but since my teens I’ve been watching more. I’m very tolerant of sf bubblegum (though the truly moronic, like Independence Day [Emmerich 1996] or Burton’s Planet of the Apes [2001], leaves me frigid). I loved The Matrix [Wachowski brothers 1999] and I’m sure I’m not the only writer who can feel its influence, especially in fight scenes. I loved the Alien franchise, particularly Alien [Scott 1979] and Alien3 [Fincher 1992] (which I think is very under-rated). I like most half-decent (and many completely un-decent) monster films. I like John Carpenter when he’s on form—I’ve seen Prince of Darkness [1987] probably more than any other film. In terms of influences, the aesthetic that I try to filch respectfully comes most from filmmakers like the Quay Brothers and Jan Švankmajer.

Probably one of the most enduring influences on me was a childhood playing RPGs: Dungeons and Dragons [D&D] and others. I’ve not played for sixteen years and have absolutely no intention of starting again, but I still buy and read the manuals occasionally. There were two things about them that particularly influenced me. One was the mania for cataloguing the fantastic: if you play them for any length of time, you get to know pretty much all the mythological beasts of all pantheons out there, along with a fair bit of the theology. I still love all that—I collect fantastic bestiaries, and one of the main spurs to write a secondary-world fantasy was to invent a bunch of monsters, half of which I’m sure I’ll never be able to fit into any books.

The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.

I’m conscious of the problems with that: probably my favorite piece of fantastic-world creation ever is the VIRICONIUM series by M. John Harrison [The Pastel City (1971), A Storm of Wings (1980), In Viriconium (1982), and Viriconium Nights (1984; rev. 1985)], which is carefully constructed to avoid any domestication, and which thereby brilliantly achieves the kind of alienating atmosphere I’m constantly striving for, so it’s not as if I think that quantification is the “correct” way to construct a world. But it’s one that appeals to the anal kid in me. To that extent, though I wouldn’t compare myself to Harrison in terms of quality, I sometimes feel as if, formally, my stuff is a cross between Viriconium and D&D.

JG: You mentioned being drawn to the systematization in RPGs. How do you see that in your writing?

CM: I start with maps, histories, time lines, things like that. I spend a lot of time working on stuff that may or may not actually find its way into the novel, but I know a lot more about the world than makes it into the stories. That’s the “RPG” factor: it’s about systematizing the world.

But though that’s my method, I don’t start with it. I don’t start with a bunch of graph papers and rulers. When I’m writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images—things that have come into my head, totally abstracted from any narrative, that I’ve fixated on. After that, I construct a world, or an area, into which that general setting, that atmosphere, and the specific images I’ve focused on can fit. It’s at that stage that the systematization begins for me.

I hope this doesn’t sound pompous, but that’s how I see the best weird fiction as the intersection of the traditions of Surrealism with those of pulp. I don’t start with the graph paper and the calculators like a particular kind of D&D dungeonmaster: I start with an image, as unreal and affecting as possible, just like the Surrealists. But then I systematize it, and move into a different kind of tradition.

I grew up with a love for the Surrealists which has never faded: in particular, the works of Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Hans Bellmer, and Paul Delvaux, along with those adopted by or close to the Surrealists, like Edward Burra, James Ensor, and Frida Kahlo. Graphic artists like Piranesi, Dürer, Escher, Bellmer’s pen-and-ink work, Mervyn Peake, Tenniell, and so on, are influential. As to modern comics and graphic art, I admire David Sandlin, Charles Burns, Kim Dietsch, Julie Doucet, and Chris Ware; from the post-punk comics underground, Burne Hogarth; and more mainstream British children’s comic artists like Ken Reid. I draw myself, pen and ink stuff, often illustrating my own stories.

I was always into everything to do with sf, fantasy, horror (as well as things set under the sea, which, along with dinosaurs, is honorary fantasy). I grew up on children’s sf by people like Douglas Hill and Nicholas Fisk, as well as horror comics, which were, in retrospect, deeply odd and unpleasant. Michael de Larrabeiti’s BORRIBLES books [The Borribles (1976), The Borribles Go For Broke (1981), and Across the Dark Metropolis (1986)] were massively influential. When I was a kid I read pretty much any sf I could get my hands on, so there was a lot of good pulp along with the classics—people like Lloyd Biggle, Jr. and Linsday Gutteridge—and that reveling in genre influenced me a lot. I read a review of Perdido Street Station which said that for a Clarke winner it’s surprisingly unashamed of its roots, which I take as a massive compliment. Overall, though, what I liked best was the aesthetic of alienation, of the macabre and grotesque, so I preferred New Worlds-type stuff to American Golden Age: Aldiss, Harrison, Moorcock, Disch, Ballard, and the like are all heroes of mine.

I still find myself riffing off books from my past constantly, sometimes without remembering what I’m basing my writing on. New Crobuzon [the setting of Perdido Street Station] is highly influenced by Brian Aldiss’s The Malacia Tapestry [1976] and Tim Powers’s Anubis Gates [1983], but they’d permeated me so deeply I was initially less conscious of them than of other influences. The very first (never-ever-to-see-the-light-of-day) New Crobuzon story I wrote was about the invention of photography in a fantasy city—which is precisely the plot of Aldiss’s book. I’d forgotten that I was remembering it. I’m still scared of inadvertently ripping people off.

I always loved classic ghost stories, like Henry James’s and Robert Aikman’s. I liked Lovecraft, and then maybe eight years ago I started getting very interested in early weird fiction: Arthur Machen, Robert Chambers, E.H. Visiak, William Hope Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith, David Lindsay (though he’s not in quite the same tradition, there are shared aesthetics). There were two things I found particularly compelling about this work. One was the peculiarities of pulp style. If you look at the way critics describe Lovecraft, for example, they often say he’s purple, overwritten, overblown, verbose, but it’s unputdownable. There’s something about that kind of hallucinatorily intense purple prose which completely breaches all rules of “good writing,” but is somehow utterly compulsive and affecting. That pulp aesthetic of language is something very tenuous, which all too easily simply becomes shit, but is fascinating where it works. Though I also love much more minimalist writers, it’s that lush approach that I’m drawn to in terms of my own writing, for good and bad.

The other thing I liked about weird fiction was its location at the intersection of sf, fantasy, and horror. Lovecraft’s monsters do magic, but they’re time-traveling aliens with über-science, who do horrific things. Hodgson’s are similar (though less scientifically savvy). David Lindsay’s “spaceship” travels back to Arcturus by totally spurious—and not even remotely convincing—science, but it masquerades as sf. I find that bleeding of genre edges completely compelling. There’s been a (to my mind rather scholastic and sterile) debate about whether Perdido Street Station is sf or fantasy (or even horror—it made the long-list for the Bram Stoker Award). I always say that what I write is weird fiction, in that it is self-consciously at the intersection.

Some writers loom in my consciousness for single works, some for their whole oeuvre. M. John Harrison I consider one of the greatest living writers in any genre, and his influence on me is immense. Mervyn Peake, for his combination of lush language and aesthetic austerity; Gene Wolfe, for oddly similar reasons; all of Iain Sinclair’s books, but particularly Downriver [1991]; Alasdair Gray, especially Lanark [1981]; Russell Hoban, especially Riddley Walker [1980]; a book called Junglist by people calling themselves “Two Fingers” and “James T. Kirk” [1997]. I find Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre [1847] continually astonishing.

I love short stories, and there are writers like Borges, Calvino, and Stefan Grabinski whose short work is a constant reference, but there are others who loom large for me on the strength of a single piece: Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over,” E.L. White’s “Lukundoo,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Saki’s “Sredni Vastar.” I just finished Kelly Link’s collection Stranger Things Happen [2001], and can already feel her influencing me. Writers I’ve come to more recently include John Crowley, Unica Zürn (Hans Bellmer’s partner), Jeff VanderMeer, and Jeffrey Thomas.

The biggest recent influence on me, though, is not an sf writer: it’s the Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera, who died fourteen years ago. I first read him a decade ago, but came back to him recently and read all his published work. He’s quite astonishing. His influences are radically different from the folklorist tradition that one often associates with African literature. He writes in the tradition of the Beats, the Surrealists, the Symbolists, and he marshals their tools to talk about the freedom struggle, the iniquities of post-independence Zimbabwe, racism, loneliness, and so on. His poetry and prose are almost painfully intense and suffer from all the problems you’d imagine—the writing can be prolix and clunky—but the way he constantly wrestles with English (which wasn’t his first language) is extraordinary. He demands sustained effort from the reader, so that the work is almost interactive—reading it is an active process of collaboration with the writer—and the metaphors are simultaneously so unclichéd and so apt that he reinvigorates the language. The epigram to The Scar is taken from his most obscure book, Black Sunlight [1980], and he is a very strong presence throughout my recent writing.

JG: I want to turn the discussion from literary influences to your political involvement. Would you describe that involvement, discussing its effect on your writing?

CM: I was always left-wing, and from the age of about thirteen I’ve been involved in campaigns against nuclear weapons and apartheid, going on marches and demonstrations. Later, I became interested in postmodernist philosophy, but became very dissatisfied with it in my second year of university. I was studying anthropology, and I felt there was something theoretically disingenuous about postmodernism’s rejection of “grand narratives.” Specifically, its inability to deal with the cross-cultural nature of women’s oppression pissed me off, and for a brief while I turned to feminist theory. But I also felt there were serious lacunae in that tradition, and, while I continue to identify with feminism as a political struggle, I was unsatisfied by some of its theoretical blindspots.

At Cambridge there was an organization of Marxist students, and I’d been deeply impressed with the rigor and scope of their arguments, as well as their activism. Like most students, I knew that Marxism was teleological, outdated, and wrong, but I was stunned to find out that it wasn’t really any of those things, nor did it have the slightest connection with Stalinism. Two things in particular persuaded me of Marxism’s validity. One was that this theoretical approach dovetailed perfectly with my pre-existing political instincts and commitments, and gave them more rigor. The other was that Marxism— historical materialism—was theoretically all-encompassing: it allowed me to understand the world in its totality without being dogmatic. I’d felt, for example, that while feminist theory might have an explanation of gender inequality, it didn’t have much to offer on, say, international exchange rates. Marxism was able to make sense of all the various social phenomena from a unified perspective.

Although we revolutionary socialists are always accused of being utopian, nothing strikes me as more utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope. Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now. In a world where 30,000 to 40,000 children die of malnutrition daily while grain ships are designed to dump food into the sea if the price dips too low, it’s worth the risk.

For the last five years, I’ve been an activist with the International Socialist Tendency, and in a broader organization called the Socialist Alliance—as a member of which I stood for parliament in the recent general elections. I’m not an activist by predisposition but by conviction. Generally, I’d much rather be reading sf than being on a picket line, but I simply cannot believe that this world is the best we can do, and I can’t relax while it’s all we’ve got.

Socialism and sf are the two most fundamental influences in my life.

JG: Let’s turn to more specific discussion about your novels, and I’d like to begin by asking about your first novel, King Rat. Why did you choose drum’n’bass/jungle music as the musical score for the novel?

CM: I chose it because I love it. It’s rhythmically, thematically, aesthetically powerful. It’s a music constructed on theft, it’s a mongrel of a hundred snatches of stolen music. That’s what sampling is. And there are places in King Rat where I snatched a bunch of real lyrics, and looped them over each other, so the writing mimicked the music. It wasn’t entirely conscious, though—consciously, I was trying to mimic the rhythm of the music. Drum’n’bass is a music born out of the working-class—and unemployed—culture in London. Obviously it’s politically important to me not to pathologize, demonize, or fetishize working-class culture, but I didn’t choose to use it for political reasons so much as because it’s where the music’s at.

JG: The story of the Pied Piper of Hamlin is central to the novel, and the African trickster Anansi is there as well. Would you expand on your use of folk tales and myths in King Rat?

CM: All the animal superiors came from various mythic or artistic influences. The Anansi in the book is more the spider in his West Indian incarnation. The King of the Cats is mentioned, who’s a fairy tale figure (and also refers to An Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin [1983]). Kataris, Queen Bitch, is a demon in charge of dogs from a pantheon I can’t remember. Loplop, Bird Superior, is a character from Max Ernst’s paintings. Lord of the Flies refers to the novel of that name [by William Golding 1959], of course. All the animals in the novel have their own boss, and you’ve got figures from African, European, mythic, and artistic traditions all mixed up.

JG: The London Underground—what I’d call the subway system in the US—forms a series of metaphors for much of what goes on in the novel, from the use of subterranean settings, to its secret (underground) history of London, to the underground music scene. Would you discuss that?

CM: There’s a whole tradition of “underground London” books, of which Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere [1998] is probably the most well-known and successful. Partly it’s because it’s such an old city, and it’s been constructed on top of earlier layers. There are rivers that have been covered up by the city, and tunnels and construction, of which the tube (the subway trains) are a relatively recent but culturally weighty addition. Of course, the idea of things lurking around below the surface is such a potent image it’s no surprise that it features heavily in literature.

There’s something particularly powerful about the underground trains in London. They’re the oldest subway network in the world, and they are an absolutely central part of London culture. The tube map has become incredibly iconic. The very names of stations and train lines loom very large in our culture, so they were ripe to be pilfered. The details I wrote were right at the time—there’s a scene set in Mornington Crescent Station, which is particularly well-known in Britain because it features in a very popular radio comedy show [I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue]. Setting a violent and unpleasant scene there was kind of like pissing in a cozy bedroom.

JG: “Let’s put the ‘rat’ back into ‘Fraternity’” (317), Saul declaims at the end of King Rat. And you put fraternity into the novel. How and why is that an important theme in the novel?

CM: The “revolution” at the end of the novel is structured around the slogans of the French Revolution, not the Bolshevik revolution, which has been flagged through references to Lenin earlier in the novel. In other words, for those who’ve read a bit of Marxist theory, it is a bourgeois revolution, rather than a socialist one. It’s not a really happy ending, in that the rats, if they follow through on Saul’s suggestion, won’t usher in any kind of utopia, but will only get to where we humans are now.

JG: Turning to Perdido Street Station, how is it a London novel?

CM: In a very straightforward way, the city of New Crobuzon is clearly analogous to a chaos-fucked Victorian London. But it’s more than just the geography (river straddling, near the coast) and the industry (heavy, riddled with class conflict). It’s the way the city intersects with the literature that chronicles it. London is a trope for literature in an incredibly strong way: “Hell is a city much like London,” Shelley says, and through Blake and de Quincey, and Iain Sinclair, and Chesterton, and Machen, and Ackroyd, and Gaiman, and all the others, London is a neurotic tic for literature. Take those ideas—the danger, the intricacy, the mystery, the rich fecundity, the semi-autonomous architecture—and magic/surreal/acid it up a bit: that’s New Crobuzon. Though New Crobuzon contains other cities—Cairo in particular—it’s London at heart.

JG: John Clute talks about British sf being about ruins, expressing a pessimism about expansionism gone wrong (at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, March 2002). Can you speak to that in terms of Perdido Street Station?

CM: Post-New Worlds sf is partly pessimistic, but it’s more melancholic than miserable. It rather likes being in the ruins. I love that aesthetic, and it’s what I grew up on. I think, though, that Perdido Street Station is a little more muscular than that. It’s more pulpy, in what I hope are good as well as bad ways. Where the characters of New Worlds writers—who are my heroes—had “breakfast among the ruins,” the people in New Crobuzon busily build some other piece of shit using parts of the ruins. The ruins are still there, but I think that there’s more dynamism towards the environment. This is emphatically not a criticism of the earlier writers—it’s just an observation about a distinction of approach.

JG: Is Perdido Street Station in some way a child of Thatcherite, or Majorite, or Blairite England?

CM: I think you have to disaggregate them. Very crudely, I think that the New Worlds writers are writers of social collapse, of a political downturn, of the closing down of possibilities, and of worsening tensions without much of a sense of alternative, though I think their pessimism isn’t as straightforward as it may appear to be. I think that what’s happened recently is that we still have the same aggressive, neoliberal, profit-driven, and anti-human agenda at the top, but there’s been an amazingly exciting sense of alternatives (the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 2000 form a useful watershed) which was missing in the 1980s, and even through the 1990s. In the cultural milieu, that doesn’t translate into obviously political or “optimistic” sf, but it does inform it with what is perhaps a more powerful sense of social agency and interaction with both real and fictional landscapes. I don’t think my writing’s terribly optimistic, though I am.

JG: In what ways does the novel reflect or respond to the contemporary situation politically, aesthetically, personally, or otherwise?

CM: There are certain deliberate references: the dock strike by Vodyanoi dockers is a direct reference to the long-running labor dispute in Liverpool. There are general points about the depiction of social tensions and so on. But I don’t write fiction to comment on the day-to-day situation, so I think the bulk of the response or reflection is in that generalized way I spoke of in the last answer. I think it’s to do with coming to terms with a new sense of social agency.

JG: In what ways does the novel develop or explore Marxism? How does it bring Marxism into a contemporary perspective? Is there a kind of postmodern Marxism and, if so, is it at work in Perdido Street Station?

CM: I don’t really accept the term “postmodern” as explaining very much in the real world—I’d use it as a description for certain schools of theory, and certain schools of art. I don’t consider myself a postmodernist in any real sense. Postmodernism has done quite a good job of colonizing lots of techniques and implying that anything like those techniques is therefore “postmodernist.” You can use certain deconstructive techniques, for example, without being a postmodernist—still being a classical Marxist. I realize that to some extent this is a semantic quibble, and if someone finds it useful to describe my stuff in that way, that’s up to them, but I’d resist it, because I don’t think it’s fair that hybridity, uncertainty, blurring identities, fracturing, formal experimentation, or the blurring of high and low culture should be ceded to postmodernism! I want all that, and I’m a classical Marxist. For me, much of that list is about dialectics, which is something that underpins a lot of what I think about. The novel isn’t “about” Marxism. When I want to explore Marxism, I write non-fiction. However, I represent certain concerns in fictional form because they fascinate me. There are direct political topics, such as the arguments over union organization, over the class basis of fascism, over the internal contradictions of racist consciousness, and so on, in the book. There are also slightly more abstruse ones. The model of consciousness explored in the book—where human consciousness is apparently ego plus subconscious, but is in fact the dialectical interrelation of the two, rather than an arithmetic addition, is a playful exploration not only of dialectics. It also explores the models of consciousness that I think explain social agency and the relationship between intuition and knowledge, which is something that Gramsci, for example, talks about a great deal.

I write the novel because I love writing books about weird shit and monsters, but I fill it with the concerns and fascinations that are in my head, and it’s no surprise that Marxism features large in there.

JG: You resist the “postmodern” label that people like myself are so eager to use. Would you expand on your statement that “much of that list is about dialectics which is something that underpins a lot of what I think about”?

CM: I’ve resisted the notion or label of postmodernism for some years, and to understand why you have to understand the academic culture in the early 1990s, when I was at university. The long and short of it is that “postmodernism” was often—way too often—used as a stick with which to beat Marxism. That meant that when I became a Marxist, there was a certain polemical importance to pointing out that many of the critical tools associated with postmodernism could also be used by those of us cheerfully hanging on to “meta-narratives” and the like. To that extent, my refusal of the term is particularly regarding postmodernism as an academic movement. Deconstruction, for example—fine, useful method. But anti-totality? Anti-Marxist? Well, much as I admire Derrida (which I most sincerely do), certainly his rather wan liberalism and ultimately idealist underpinnings don’t sit well with Marxism, but much of the project of uncovering internal contradictions, and seeing how they cannibalize each other, and so on, is perfectly compatible with Marxism, and has been applied by Marxist theorists.

It’s the big claims of postmodernism—and to be fair, generally what I consider the vulgar end of postmodernism-lite, Baudrillard and his epigones—that I wanted to dissociate myself from. It was particularly sharp in social anthropology, where the cultural relativism led to some (to my mind) terrible capitulations to inequity.

I reject postmodernity as a description of the world; we live, I would argue, in late capitalism, and the “post” label adds nothing particularly useful. Plenty of people I respect massively, like Jameson, have used it: I know that, but still. I reject postmodernism as a philosophical position (though God knows it covers too many bases—are we talking Rorty? Lacan? Derrida? Baudrillard?). If people want to describe a particular art movement that way, then that’s up to them. I’m still not convinced—take my stuff, for example—what do you learn about my work by applying postmodernist theory?

The point about dialectics is that the postmodern fascination with hybridity and miscegenation too often blurs into a fetishistic and sometimes quite self-indulgent celebration of marginality for its own sake. Obviously, the best stuff doesn’t do this, but you see it, for example, in a lot of the “subaltern studies” canon. Now, dialectics are centrally important to me, as they focus on much the same stuff—blurred interstices, gray areas, hard cases—but as part of a social and historical totality. The conception of totality is absolutely central to my political and theoretical life. Of course it has a bad reputation, what with postmodernist assault on one side, and the grotesque legacy of Stalinism on the other. But the point of dialectics as about movement, dynamism, tendencies within an overall, comprehensible, and total system is incredibly illuminating to me. In terms of historical change—the tensions that drive it being simultaneously within the system, and overthrowing it—and in terms of understanding modernity.

This is obvious in my fiction in that the social tensions and contradictions that drive plot are generally endogenous—I try to avoid the sense of a static system. Modernity, history, is always-already-in-transition. That’s what dialectics is about, to me.

JG: If you see sf as a political act, an exploration of the relationship of power and powerlessness, how do you use sf to make that exploration in Perdido Street Station?

CM: I think sf can be a political act, but generally in a fairly mediated, not to say attenuated, way. Politically speaking, the most important things I do are political: demonstrations, discussions, going to support picket lines. But power relations are very important to the novel, and inform it in what I think is a fairly simple way. If you look at the Surrealists, for example, they examine questions of power and oppression in the very form of their work, which is something very radical, and something that necessarily makes their work less than straightforward: it’s not sloganeering. On the other hand, I examine such things more in the content than in the form (though I’m trying to go beyond that, particularly in The Scar, which has a contrary relationship with its readers). The depiction of relations between the government and the citizenry in Perdido Street Station allows me to polemicize and exaggerate certain tendencies in reality. The obvious example is the “suffrage lottery.” This obviously relates to the limits of reformism in terms of whose vote counts, as well as to earlier debates about expanding voting rights. But what makes the book sf, rather than the somewhat lumpen kind of pseudo-magical realism that mainstream writers like Paul Theroux and Margaret Atwood tend to write when they want to extrapolate to make political points, is that the symbolism of that does not ride roughshod over the trope’s internal consistency. It is possible that a vote lottery could have sprung up in the novel’s world, and be more or less accepted (anyone doubting that it is possible should read the debates around expanding suffrage in the nineteenth century). That’s the sf concern for internal cognitive rigor, and to my mind that makes the polemical point more, not less strong. Mainstream writers don’t trust their readers to make connections. Sf understands that the human mind is an intrinsically metaphorizing machine, and that therefore you do not have to labor the connections to make your point. That’s why Suzy McKee Charnas’s work or Le Guin’s better novels are better and more intelligent and persuasive about women’s oppression than, say, The Handmaid’s Tale [1985]. The polemics and satire in Perdido Street Station don’t undermine the secondary world I create, I hope.

JG: What other theoretical explorations are you making in Perdido Street Station?

CM: There’s a lot about philosophical materialism: how to have magic, but to explain it in terms that are scientific (or pseudo-scientific but materialist). There’s also exploration of something else that fascinates me: what happens when you’re put in a position where any choice is morally “bad.” There are a couple of points in the book where people make moral choices, and I’ve been criticized for the choices “I” have made. Of course, I don’t make those choices, the characters do, and I’m not convinced the other choice in those situations would have been any less right. This is the sort of thing I thought Philip Pullman was doing with the HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy [Northern Lights; The Golden Compass in USA (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000)], until the third volume let us down.

The characters are not necessarily my mouthpieces. I particularly found that with the ending of the novel, Isaac’s dilemma. I’ve read various criticisms of Isaac’s choice as if it were my idea of what was right. I was trying to construct a genuine moral dilemma, to which there was not really a right answer. If you read the ending, you realize that though Isaac ostensibly did what Kar’uchai, Yagharek’s “victim” (though, crucially, she wouldn’t accept that description) asked him, he may well have done it precisely because he did not understand what she was saying to him. He was unable to apply any standards other than his own cultural ones, and, more precisely, the standards of a man who believes his own lover has just suffered rape, like Kar’uchai, so he is a man in thrall to his own outrage, even though Kar’uchai has told him that rape is not what happened to her, not as he understands it. In other words, Isaac is congenitally incapable of dealing with the dilemma—its criteria are unthinkable to him—and I don’t have the right answer. His decision is largely a refusal to make a decision; this appears to take sides against Yagharek, but that’s more or less by default.

I didn’t want to make a judgmental, moralistic ending. I tried to make the ending about judgmentalism, constructed around a deep moral dilemma, and a query about our culture’s faintly fetishistic critique of rape. Not, I hope it goes without saying, that rape doesn’t need critiquing: it’s just the particulars of the general critique that rather trouble me. That’s what the whole conversation Isaac has with Kar’uchai is about. And I wish more people had caught that. I don’t know what the right thing to do was—I suspect there wasn’t a right thing in that circumstance. I was very proud of the ending (I worried at it hard), but if you read it as a manifesto, then it must suck.

JG: At the 2002 ICFA, you described yourself as an “unapologetic pulp kid.” Would you characterize that essence of genre that you glory in? How do you express it in Perdido Street Station? In what ways do you see yourself as moving away from or altering or pushing the edges of genre as well?

CM: I think for me genre—sf and fantasy and horror—is not about science, or even about extrapolation. I think “cognitive estrangement” [Darko Suvin’s definition of sf] obscures as much as it explains. There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the sf pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with sf don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former. They are embarrassed and confused by the weird, and so they have neither the Bakhtinian side nor the Newtonian—neither the carnival nor the internal rigor. Look at something like Gulliver’s Travels [1726], on the other hand. Never for a second diluting the satire, Swift also very much enjoys describing giant wasps, and surrendering to the logic of his secondary worlds. That is what I see as at the core of the pulp aesthetic: the surrender to the weird. It’s bizarre that it’s seen as inimical to literature.

I don’t think I’d be claiming to push the edges of genre. The most I’d claim is that I’m staking out remembered territory. Most of what I do has been done before. The things that may seem to be radical—blurring the boundaries of sf and fantasy, in particular, and bringing pulp back in, unashamed of the roots, while striving to write like the greats—I’m not the first to do.

JG: I was very interested in the “model of consciousness” explored in [Perdido Street Station] as “the dialectical interrelation of [ego plus subconscious]” that explains “social agency and the relationship between intuition and knowledge.” I’m thinking that this is connected also to the idea of the porousness between reality and unreality that seems to metaphorize that model of consciousness. Would you discuss these ideas in terms of Perdido Street Station and The Scar?

CM: It ultimately stems from a sense of the transformative agency of humans. It’s a consideration of Marx’s point that men (read people) make history, but not in the circumstances of their own choosing. What is the model of the world that makes sense of how we are both constrained and enabled by the society around us, which we can transform in turn, sometimes? And what model of consciousness makes sense of that?

The impulse to the fantastic is central to human consciousness, in that we can and constantly do imagine things that aren’t really there. More than that (and what distinguishes us from tool-using animals), we can imagine things that can’t possibly be there. We can imagine the impossible. Now, within that you have to distinguish the “never-possible” and the “might-be-possible-sometime.” Crudely, this looks like the distinction between fantasy and science fiction, but I maintain that there’s no such hard distinction and that the differences between the “never-” and the “not-yet-possible” are less important than their shared “impossibleness.” That’s not to say in some dippy hippy way that everything is possible, but that there’s no obvious line between what is and what isn’t. In fact, that underlines many of the most tenacious political fights around us—the neo-liberal claim that There is No Alternative is all about trying to draw the line of the “never-possible” at a place which strips humans of any meaningful transformative agency.

Lenin said that dreaming was a profoundly revolutionary act. He meant it, I think, in a relatively narrow sense of defending utopianism—which does, indeed, need defending. But I get uncomfortable when the left defense of fantasy starts and ends with utopia. To me, utopia is a subset of the fantastic, along with sf and fantasy, and what they share is their impossibleness, and therefore an alienating dynamic from actually-existing reality. (It’s in this sense that various Situationist slogans and Seattle stuff like “Demand the Impossible” are directly revolutionary.)

The specific content of a fantastic setting seems to me less important than the impossibility of it—which is why I think the often-cited Marxist critique of fantasy, that it’s anti-rational, unlike sf, is far too simplistic. The content may be never-possible, but you wouldn’t read Bulgakov or Kafka as simply “presenting anti-rational impossibilities;” you’d uncover the political economy of their dreams, and crucially, I think, you’d celebrate the subversion of their impossibilities. Anyway, much of the putatively rationalist/scientific stuff in sf is no more than point-and-wave, abracadabra! Plus a few equations. The point for me is that the construction of a paranoid, impossible totality is at least potentially a subversive, radical act, in that it celebrates the most unique and human aspect of our consciousness.

I like to make my radical points a bit more overt, so I often put some more or less obvious leftist content in there, too, but I emphatically deny the idea that it’s the only place where the “radicalness” of radical fantasy resides, in the content. There’s nothing intrinsically reactionary about secondary worlds, even ones with dragons in them. Post-Lukácsians might see this as “mystification;” for me it can be (though obviously it isn’t always) a kind of mental assault course, a workout for your human consciousness, an exercise for the extraordinary human moment at the dialectic interface of instrumentalism and impossibility/dreaming. In that sense, the point might be to be both as incredible/impossible and as rigorous/scientific as possible. In which case, the cardinal sin isn’t to be a “fantasist” and use magic, but to be internally inconsistent, or to use either magic or “sf-nal” technology as a Get-Out-of-Plot-Difficulty-Free card. In Perdido Street Station and The Scar, I try hard to be internally rigorous (though obviously it’s a rigor that wouldn’t work in our world). There are other levels than the straight narrative, of course, in which these questions become more complex: the structure of The Scar, for example, can’t really be understood except as a conversation with generic quest fantasy: it is also internally consistent, however, and works within its defined terms. That way, the book avoids being a conversation among a particular cognoscenti, and at least tries to be both such a conversation and a piece of art with a general resonance.

I refuse to play the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with readers. I don’t like whimsy because it doesn’t treat the fantastic seriously, and treating the fantastic seriously is one of the best ways of celebrating dialectical human consciousness there is. The one-sided celebration of the ego-driven contextually constrained instrumentally rational (as opposed to rational in a broader sense) is bureaucratic: the one-sided celebration of the subconscious, desire/fantasy driven is at best utopian, at worst sociopathic. The best fantasies—which include sf and horror—are constructed with a careful dialectic between conscious and subconscious.

JG: It has been said of sf that setting is often its major character, in terms of its importance in steering plot and developing themes, in terms of its energizing centrality to the works. Setting is one of the glories of both Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Would you discuss how and why you use setting as you do?

CM: For me, setting is absolutely crucial, but largely as a function of mood. Writers often talk about how they go about constructing books. I start with mood. There’s a particular mood I want to communicate, and that mood is often accompanied by and manifested in certain scenes that I have in mind—not yet any narrative to link them, but the scenes are clear. The characters and the narrative then come in to fill in the vast gaps between those scenes and the mood.

I’m also very interested in the whole “secondary world” aspect of fantasy. It has a dreadful reputation because of the Tolkienian epigones, but I’m continually fascinated by the project of secondary world creation. I hugely respect the rigor and fascinated seriousness and systematicity with which these worlds get created, so the pulp map-making tradition is how my world gets systematized. But it’s contingent on the mood I’m after.

As I’ve said before, one of the most interesting things to me is to try genuinely to create a kind of culture-shock in readers, and that means not explaining everything. There are plenty of things that never get spelled out, because you can’t possibly explain everything in a world. Some of those things I know the truth about offstage, but some I don’t.

JG: Your names—of places, people, etc.—are very evocative, Dickensian. Would you discuss that aspect of your world-building in Perdido Street Station and The Scar?

CM: They’re probably more Peakeian than Dickensian, really. I triangulate cheerfully and unstably between out-and-out grotesquerie, tell-tale finger-wagging, and simple aesthetic cadence. For example, in Perdido Street Station, when I decided to have an unlikeable character, the name “Vermishank” appealed to me, because of the worm reference. Generally, I don’t like the moralism of a lot of Dickens, but the sheer preposterousness of his names is quite appealing: characters called Little Johnny Poorbutgood and Master Brutalboss. What I like about Peake is that he twists the names so that the moralism goes, and you have the same idiotically overdone portmanteau referentiality, but stripped of obvious moral signposts. “Prunesquallor:” a goody? A baddy? Steerpike: the same. Who knows?

I can’t quite resist pointing fingers with the names—they’re perhaps not quite so contingent as Peake’s. It would be difficult to imagine Vermishank as a goody. Then look at The Scar: “Fennec” tells you quite a lot about the character, if you look it up [it’s a small African fox with big ears]. I needed a grotesque name (though not too grotesque, as I wanted him to be quite cool), and one with a terse cadence. I liked “Oh” sounds, and I liked the rhythm one-two-THREE, so when I realized that the best character in the book is the stock figure, The Knight of the Doleful Countenance, I named him “Uther Doul.” Many, many of the names are references. Cumbershum is from William Golding. Tintinnabulum and his companions on the ship Castor have stepped absolutely wholesale out of another story and the names tell you that with vulgar obviousness. But no one has mentioned it yet. I (recently) discovered that there is a real person called Bellis, to my astonishment. I thought I’d invented that name. But then I thought I’d invented the name “Crobuzon,” which is actually taken (stolen, forgotten, resurfacing, stripped of lineage) from the book Voodoo in New Orleans [Robert Tallant 1983]—it’s a street name. I’ve read the book, and I don’t think that’s coincidence. God knows what else I’ve filched.

JG: The Scar seems more tightly constructed than Perdido Street Station. What did you learn from writing The Scar?

CM: I learnt a huge amount from writing that book, by far the most of anything I’ve written. I’ve never been so self-conscious about writing, about construction, about structure and language. I think I really turned a corner, and I’m hoping The Scar will be a hinge-point for me, something I can look back on always and see how I moved on as a writer.

I became acutely conscious of structure, for one thing. I also realized that my tendencies to overwriting (of which I’m very conscious) can be reined in: I learnt to control myself. I’m not sure whether I learnt it in time to get everything in The Scar right, but I promise to try hard from now on. When Stephen King releases “special editions” of his books, they’re always about 50,000 words longer. If I ever release the definitive, special, improved Perdido Street Station, it’ll be shorter than the original.

I think I’m getting much better as a writer, and it was the complexity of The Scar’s structure and narrative that got me there.

JG: The leitmotifs of The Scar include scars (duh), language, and storytelling. Would you discuss these motifs in the novel? What other motifs are important?

CM: Scarification, obviously, is the most important motif. Scars are memory. The epigram from Dambudzo Marechera is completely central to the book: “Yet the memory would not set into the setting sun, that green and frozen glance to the wide blue sea where broken hearts are wrecked out of their wounds. A blind sky bleached white the intellect of human bone, skinning the emotions from the fracture to reveal the grief underneath. And the mirror reveals me, a naked and vulnerable fact” (from Black Sunlight). The mirror reveals us, naked and vulnerable facts. We are our scars; they are not marks that spoil us, they constitute us. Again, it’s very much the idea of being constrained and enabled by history, history marking us but us marking it right back. Taking scars seriously is about trying to take seriously the historicity of social agency. But in The Scar, it’s at a much more interior, emotional level than the more obvious politics of Perdido Street Station. I wanted to see if I could write something that was both political and historic, but moving at an individual level. I wanted Bellis’s own scarification (in all senses) to matter to the reader.

I wasn’t nearly so conscious of storytelling and language as I wrote, but I realized that they were emerging as themes. Language and translation have featured quite a bit in my writing.

Another motif is blood, which is obviously related to The Scars. Blood features heavily all the way through, as sustenance, as security, as armor. Blood isn’t safe, at all, in the book. It’s The Scars, ultimately, that make it safe.

JG: Would you talk about the character of Bellis Coldwine, who was the main character of the novel?

CM: When I wrote The Scar, I was expecting lots of comments about the fact that the main protagonist is a woman. I was delighted not to get many. A male author today is less likely to be owlishly asked how he wrote a female protagonist. Of course, had I got it howlingly, embarrassingly wrong, I’m sure I would have heard about it.

Bellis was the character above all others whom I thought of when I was writing, not only as a woman but as a woman who has experienced sexism all her life. Of course, the other female characters have also, but it doesn’t impact them or the story so directly. Bellis’s relationship to other characters, her relationship to her work, to her sexuality, all seem to be a particular response to a gendered and oppressive world. And that is by no means to see her as a victim—she’s not, and she’s not damaged in any straightforward way by the sexism—but it’s a reality she lives in and through. In her minor deceptions (publishing books under her initial), in her perhaps surprising use of make-up as a mask, in her coldness and self-control, I wanted her to be a very tough, impressive person who’s had to face a bunch of shit and has dealt with it.

Funnily enough, many people have said to me, “It’s very brave that you wrote such an unlikeable character as Bellis.” I love Bellis! I think she’s brilliant.

JG: Bellis is, as you say, a very strong character who’s had to put up with sexism her whole life. Maybe she’s one reason WisCon chose you as its 2003 Guest of Honor, along with Carol Emshwiller. How would you describe your feminism? What are its sources?

CM: Feminism and feminist concerns have been central to my politics for a long time. I used to say unequivocally that I was a feminist—or perhaps a “pro-feminist,” whatever the appropriate term is. These days I would describe myself as a socialist, and insist that, in order for socialism to be meaningful, it must address structures of gender oppression and inequality. Unfortunately, historically, there have been socialist movements which have failed in that task, but for me that’s not just a political and moral imperative but a theoretical one.

Obviously, growing up the son of a single mother must have had a lot to do with my views. Also, I spent a lot of my youth in movements such as the campaign for nuclear disarmament, the anti-apartheid movement, and so on. I was dealing with leftism and critical thinking of various stripes, and sexism was not acceptable (though it went on all over the place).

Theoretically speaking, my socialism is in a very direct way a product of my concerns over gender inequality. I was a left-postmodernist for a couple of years, but I was studying social anthropology and I became very disenchanted with the way postmodernism’s dislike of grand narratives was segueing into a cultural relativism which ran a real risk of minimizing exploitive and/or oppressive cultural practices, or rendering them immune to critique. It was gender that broke me from postmodern theory. Faced with the overwhelming and consistent oppression of women in different cultures, too many postmodernists abdicated the necessity of a systematic explanation: in other words, we needed a grand narrative to make sense of this oppression.

I turned to feminist theory and learned a lot from it, but I had two major problems. One was that if it could do what I wanted, which was to provide a general, systematic theory, it tended to essentialize about gender. The other was the limits of feminist theory. Much of it could provide a coherent, systematic theory of women’s oppression (whether you agreed with it or not) but it couldn’t provide such a theory of, say, French-US relations in the 1970s. At this point I went back to Marxism and began to examine it seriously. Yes, much of the socialist and labor movement has been execrable on the question of women and gender, but I discovered the vein of writing that stretches right back to Engels (in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State [1884]), through later socialists including Eleanor Burke Leacock, and realized that there was a Marxism that grounded its understanding of women’s oppression precisely in the systematic theory I was looking for, that made total sense of it not just on its own but as part of the exploitive totality of relations in class society. It doesn’t minimize or ignore gender inequality.

I would say that my empathic, gut feelings about gender inequality are to do with my youth and upbringing, and my theoretical relationship to feminism(s) and the question of gender is informed by my theoretical-political trajectory since my late teens.

JG: In what ways did you consciously or unconsciously use feminist ideas in your fiction?

CM: Very consciously. I’m sure people would be able to find passages to excoriate me with, but I really try to deal with these notions quite consciously and carefully. I take it seriously as a duty. In The Scar, a book all about ships, no ship is ever once referred to as “she.” For another (rather banal) example, there is a passage in The Scar where the characters face voracious female mosquito-women. They are female simply because it’s only female mosquitos that suck blood. I was, however, conscious of the trope of voracious/monstrous/ vampiric women, so a couple of chapters later I wrote: “Some of [his] companions made nervous jokes …. ‘Women,’ they said, and laughed shakily about females of all species being bloodsuckers, and so on. [He] tried, for the sake of conviviality, but he could not bring himself to laugh at their idiocies.” The point is, I try to take sexism seriously as a factor in people’s consciousnesses, but to be sensitive to gendered assumptions.

The most careful and conscious exploration of feminist ideas comes at the end of Perdido Street Station. I had been very affected by an article that Germaine Greer wrote in which she provocatively argued that the specific configurations of the horror that we culturally feel at rape is sexist, casting the woman as “despoiled,” as having suffered a “fate worse than death.” This is obviously very tricky ground. What I wanted to do in Perdido Street Station was absolutely not to minimize rape, to treat it as the monumentally vile act it is, but to do so in a way that did not sacralize or sexualize women, both of which I think are embedded in the particular fetishism of horror our culture places on rape. The degree of anger is obviously perfectly legitimate. I wanted to write about rape in an absolutely serious way, but showing it as something women suffer, and overcome, rather than it ruining them or driving them mad. I wanted to think about the victim and the crime in social terms rather than in essentialist religious/sexual terms. If there was a non-gendered word for this, I’d say our culture’s relationship with rape is “hysterical”—it’s certainly neurotic.

I would be horrified for anyone to think I was minimizing rape. That’s why it was quite liberating dealing with this very tricky stuff in fiction rather than in theory, because I could nudge at these questions, nose up to them without tying myself down.

JG: You object to the “consolatory” nature (as Tolkien puts it) of The Lord of the Rings [1954-1955] and try to avoid it in your own work. Could you explain what you mean by the term, why you object to it, how you avoid it?

CM: It doesn’t mean, necessarily, a Happy Ending, although it often manifests itself in that way. That’s why the counterclaim that the ending of The Lord of the Rings is quite tragic is true, but beside the point. To me, consolation is about an aesthetic which eases the relationship of the reader to reality, which smooths over contradictions. Walter Benjamin said somewhere that the purpose of historical materialism should be to rub history “against the grain.” It seems to me that consolation does the opposite—it smooths away. If you have a big happy ending you might be saying “The status quo was benevolent, and has been restored.” The idea here is that social contradiction comes from outside and has been vanquished. Alternatively, though, you might take Tolkien’s approach, and rather wistfully argue that the world is post-lapsarian, and that therefore it is Tragic, and a Vale of Sorrows. In other words, the fucked-up mess and intrinsic tensions have been explained away. It’s tragic, sad, yes, but it still consoles in that it smooths over everyday tensions. We got kicked out of the garden, the elves left—what do you expect?

I try to avoid it with various techniques. One is to undercut narrative security—I would claim that the endings of my books aren’t downbeat, but they certainly try to undermine straightforward closure. There is closure, but it’s often emotional or thematic rather than narrative. That way the desire for comfort may be indulged (there’s nothing wrong with wanting comfort, God knows), but to get at it you might have to engage in a slightly unexpected way with the text, and that encourages a kind of engaged and critical reading.

The other thing, of course, is a continuing refusal to posit societies as internally coherent, consistent, bounded, and essentially safe. They are fractured and dangerous. The dynamics tearing them apart (the dynamics that lead to narrative) are intrinsic.

JG: You’ve spoken very seriously about your writing. As we end this interview, I’d like you to address their “ripping yarn” dynamic as well.

CM: It’s very important to me that these are books which are good stories, which keep people turning pages, which move people emotionally, and excite them, as well as being about something. It’s one of the major catastrophic failings of the mainstream writers that try their hand at fantastic stuff, that they don’t trust the story: they make their work “about” things, but are embarrassed to grant also its internal narrative integrity. Which is why they read like heavy-handed sermons.

I’m not resistant to interpretation. I love it, I find it incredibly illuminating. But as long as my books are also ripping yarns. And sad stories.

[darkmaga-returns]

The Individual in Modern Medical Ethics

Public health ethics, together with basic human rights law, are based around the primacy of freedom of choice, otherwise considered the necessity of informed consent. While prominent arguments have been raised against bodily autonomy in the past few years, there are very good reasons why power in medicine was held to be with the individual patient rather than the practitioner. 

Firstly, when people are given power over others, they commonly misuse it. This was apparent under European fascism and the eugenics approaches common in the United States and elsewhere in the first half of the 20th century. Secondly, psychological experiments have routinely shown that ordinary people can turn into abusers where a “mob mentality” develops. Third, if all people are considered of equal worth, then it is untenable for one person to have control over the bodies of others and decide on the acceptability of their beliefs and values

Many cultures have been based on inequality, such as caste systems and those condoning slavery. Justifications for colonialism were based on this premise, as have been involuntary sterilization campaigns in many countries. Therefore, we should not view such approaches as far in the past or theoretical – the world has continued to see ethnically-based violence and wars, and division based on characteristics such as race, religion, or skin color. The public health professions have historically been active implementers of such movements. We should expect that such sentiment still exists today.

[mariacallous]

Just weeks into Donald Trump’s second presidency, the Department of Homeland Security began sending immigrants living in the United States to prisons in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Panama and to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. At the time, newspapers reported that the Trump administration was pursuing similar agreements with Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Kosovo, Libya, Moldova, Rwanda, and Ukraine. The list has more recently grown to dozens of countries, including South Sudan.

Although this strategy shocked many Americans, the offshoring of detention is not new. In fact, it has a recent precedent in American history: it was used during the so-called war on terror, when Washington detained suspected terrorists in one country and took them to another, a process formally known as “extraordinary rendition.” This was often done for the express purpose of torturing suspects or enabling other governments to do so. But the practice also has a longer history. For decades, the United States and other countries have systematically and forcibly moved asylum seekers to “third countries,” or territories that have lower legal standards and that are neither their places of origin nor their intended destinations.

Trump’s approach to offshore detention, however, is unprecedented. His administration has sent hundreds of immigrants who were living in the United States, some of them for years, to third countries where there is no practical way to judge their asylum claims. Moreover, immigrants have been removed from the United States before they have had a chance to defend themselves before an immigration judge, as is standard practice in the United States. “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” a U.S. appellate court wrote in April, in a decision demanding that the Trump administration return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was wrongly sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, to the United States.

But on June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to continue deporting immigrants to third countries, including to South Sudan. The summary ruling, in which no reasoning was offered, paused a lower court’s order halting such deportations and affirming immigrants’ rights to know where they are being deported to and to challenge being sent to a country where they could face persecution or torture.

Although this offshoring practice sends a strong signal that the government is taking a hard line on immigration, it is bad policy: it is far more expensive than detaining and processing asylum seekers on the mainland, offers too many concessions to host countries that often have poor human rights records, and is used to skirt the human rights obligations to which the United States has agreed. It also portends a broader threat to the rule of law domestically; normalizing offshore detention can normalize the mistreatment of U.S. citizens. “Homegrown criminals next,” Trump told Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, during a televised meeting in the Oval Office in April.

ISLANDS OF DETENTION

Following World War II, most of the world’s countries signed international accords designed to prevent “refoulement,” or sending refugees back to places where they might be persecuted. But most governments still sought to block the entry of refugees; to do so without blatantly violating new international laws, they prevented people from setting foot on their territory and being able to ask for asylum.

One of the methods to achieve this was by offshoring the detention and processing of asylum seekers, which in the past few decades the United States has done more than any other country. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Coast Guard began intercepting asylum seekers at sea and taking them to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, where they were granted fewer rights than they would enjoy on the U.S. mainland, including access to information about their right to ask for asylum, their right to be represented by a lawyer, and their ability to file an appeal. At the height of this practice, in 1994, the base held more than 30,000 asylum seekers, most from Cuba and Haiti. With capacity at Guantánamo full, the Clinton administration sent 8,000 of the asylum seekers to Howard Air Force Base, in what was then the Panama Canal Zone, and to ships anchored in Kingston Harbor, Jamaica. Most who were found to meet the criteria of being persecuted at home were ultimately settled in the United States, but some were quietly resettled as refugees in other countries, including Australia, Nicaragua, Panama, Spain, and Venezuela, as a result of diplomatic favors from these governments.

Inspired in part by the Guantánamo model, the Australian government created its own offshore detention system, the so-called Pacific Solution. In 2001, the country’s special forces boarded a container ship carrying 433 asylum seekers, most of them from the persecuted Hazara minority group in Afghanistan. The Australian navy then transported the asylum seekers to two Pacific islands for detention: Manus, in Papua New Guinea, and Nauru, the world’s smallest island state. The countries, which were under Australian control for much of the twentieth century, accepted the deal in return for financial compensation and development aid.

From 2001 to 2007 and from 2012 to 2014, Australia sent 5,800 asylum seekers it had intercepted at sea to these islands. Hundreds who had been verified as refugees nonetheless remained detained there for years, because the Australian government wanted to deter more asylum seekers from using that route.

One of the purposes of offshore detention is to restrict the access of journalists, attorneys, and watchdogs to detention facilities. The islands’ isolation allowed abuses by detention staff to go unchecked. A cache of documents from the facility in Nauru obtained and published by The Guardian in 2016 included extensive reports of assaults on children, including sexual assault. Doctors Without Borders treated 208 patients there; it reported that 60 percent of them experienced suicidal thoughts and that 30 percent attempted suicide. The organization said that the level of mental suffering it found on Nauru was among the most severe it had “ever seen among its patients anywhere.” At least seven asylum seekers detained on Nauru died by suicide.

Recently, a number of rich countries have considered Rwanda as a potential offshoring destination. In 2013, Israel and Rwanda struck a secretive deal in which Israel sent an estimated 4,000 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers to Rwanda between 2013 to 2018. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and other authorities, the Israeli government had offered the asylum seekers a choice: a transfer to Rwanda with a $3,500 payment, repatriation to the countries they had fled, or indefinite detention in Israel. Some of the asylum seekers who chose to go to Rwanda were secretly sent to Uganda or repatriated to their countries of origin. Many of those who stayed were robbed of their cash payments. Almost all ultimately left Rwanda to seek asylum in Europe.

Denmark twice planned offshore schemes with Rwanda, first in 2011 and again in 2022, in which it would transfer asylum seekers on its territory to Rwanda for processing. The European Commission and the UN Committee Against Torture condemned the plans based on Rwanda’s history of human rights violations and the risk of refoulement, and Denmark shelved the idea without implementing it. The United Kingdom announced a similar deal with Rwanda, also in 2022. Under the plan, asylum seekers sent from the United Kingdom and granted refugee status by Rwanda could stay in Rwanda but would not be allowed to return to the United Kingdom. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom blocked the policy in 2023, citing concerns that the asylum seekers would not be safe in Rwanda. But the country may yet become an offshoring destination: in May 2025, Rwanda’s foreign minister, Olivier Nduhungirehe, claimed that Kigali was negotiating with the Trump administration to receive migrants expelled by the United States.

The clearest implementation of Europe’s aspirations to push its border control into other countries was a deal signed by the EU and Turkey in March 2016. The EU paid Turkey six billion euros and promised to grant Turkish nationals visa-free travel in exchange for the Turkish government attempting to stop asylum seekers—mostly Syrian refugees fleeing that country’s civil war—from crossing into Greece and agreeing to accept people who had been intercepted during attempts to cross. But Europe may also be on the cusp of more direct offshoring arrangements. Last year, Italy signed a five-year deal with Albania that would allow the transfer of up to 36,000 intercepted asylum seekers per year to detention facilities in Albania. Italian officials would manage the camps and process the migrants’ asylum cases in Albania, which is not an EU member state. Anyone determined to be eligible for asylum would be admitted to Italy, but those whose cases were denied would be repatriated. Asylum seekers successfully challenged the plan in Italian courts, citing the risk of refoulement.

But this past April, under a new version of the plan, Italy sent 40 migrants to the facilities for forced repatriation after their asylum applications were rejected in Italy. This marked the first known instance of an EU member state sending rejected asylum applicants to a third country outside the EU. Politicians around the EU have expressed a desire to emulate the newer Italian model, but it remains unclear if the practice will pass scrutiny in Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation and the European Court of Human Rights.

WAYS AND MEANS

Despite the recent proliferation of third-country candidates, rich countries have generally had difficulty finding hosts for their offshoring schemes. Few governments want to be stuck with masses of migrants whose countries of origin may not facilitate repatriation. There can also be reputational costs to offshore detention. After its participation in Australia’s Pacific Solution, for instance, Nauru came to be known as the “Pacific Gulag.”

Those countries that do partake have their reasons. For some, the schemes represent a way to rehabilitate their images. Rwanda’s longtime president, Paul Kagame, used the country’s deals with Denmark and the United Kingdom to promote a vision of a peaceful, stable country that was flourishing after the 1994 genocide. Critics, meanwhile, suggested that the deals were an attempt to whitewash Kagame’s support for armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and his authoritarian policies at home. Negative global reactions to the Rwandan deals suggest they have not been a reputational blessing. El Salvador, for its part, has tried to put a positive spin on having the world’s highest incarceration rate, with Bukele using the deal with the Trump administration to boast of “the best prison system in the world.”

These arrangements can also be incredibly lucrative. Italy was expected to spend around $1 billion over five years through its deal with Albania. British taxpayers will also be paying an estimated $1 billion for their government’s deal with Rwanda, despite its cancellation. The Australian government paid private contractors and the governments of Papua New Guinea and Nauru an estimated $7.75 billion to detain around 4,180 asylum seekers between 2012 and 2024. A 2016 study estimated that the Australian government would have saved about $300,000 annually per asylum seeker if it had transferred them to Australia for community detention while their claims were adjudicated. For host countries, these payments can be a windfall. During the 2012 to 2014 offshore transfers, for instance, Australian payments to Nauru represented two-thirds of the island’s GDP.

Speaking at a press conference in February, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the Salvadoran government’s “very generous offer” to detain immigrants deported from the United States. Rubio said that the $6 million plan between the countries—the details of which are opaque—would “outsource, at a fraction of the cost, at least some of the most dangerous and violent criminals that we have.” Yet the economic costs of processing and detaining asylum seekers offshore are much higher than processing and detaining them onshore. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has estimated that the average daily cost of detaining an immigrant in the United States is $152. Alternatives to detention are far cheaper: the agency’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, for instance, which monitors asylum seekers via telephone reporting, a smartphone application, or an ankle or wrist bracelet, costs only $4.20 per immigrant per day.

Countries seeking offshore processing and detention often offer concessions beyond direct payments for services. In the past, such deals have paved the way for trade agreements, diplomatic support, weapons transfers, or the easing of visa requirements. Like several other countries that serve as migration buffers, Albania is a candidate for EU membership; the Italian government has expressed support for its accession. Willingness to allow the detention of migrants on their soil gives countries such as Albania leverage in these negotiations. Several third countries approached by the Trump administration to detain migrants have reportedly sought to avoid being placed on the list of countries whose nationals are banned from traveling to the United States.

COMMAND PERFORMANCE

The real rationale for countries wishing to offshore the processing and detention of asylum seekers and even long-term immigrants is to create a spectacle of control while hiding individual immigrants in legal black holes. Offshoring schemes make for compelling political theater. Bukele, for instance, released a slick video on social media, with English-language commentary, that celebrated the arrival of deportation flights from the United States. It opens with drone footage of the aircraft but then cuts to a montage of machine guns and guards in balaclavas frogmarching detainees under flashing red and blue lights before roughly shaving their heads and stuffing them into cells. The following day, the White House released its own video in which a handcuffed man is frisked on an airport tarmac to the tune of Semisonic’s hit song from 1998, “Closing Time”: “Closing time / you don’t have to go home / but you can’t stay here.”

Such productions are a way for the Trump administration to show domestic supporters that it is making good on its promise to carry out mass deportations—even if the number of deportations this year is on pace to be lower than it was during the final year of the Biden administration. Other aims are to scare asylum seekers and unauthorized migrants already in the United States into self-deporting and to deter potential future immigrants with images of harsh treatment.

Hidden beneath the spectacle are the fates of real-life people. The United States is party to a UN convention against torture or degrading treatment, the domestic obligations of which are implemented through the U.S. Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998. The law’s core provision states that “it shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” And yet the U.S. government is actively sending immigrants to places such as El Salvador, where according to independent watchdogs and to the State Department itself, prisoners are subject to endemic torture.

Moreover, most instances of offshoring under Trump have arguably amounted to extrajudicial deportations, the results of orders from Department of Homeland Security officials and not immigration judges. The Immigration and Nationality Act specifies that when immigrants are deported, they should be sent to their country of citizenship or former residence. Only if those options are “impracticable, inadvisable, or impossible” can they be deported to a third country. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor laid out in her dissent in the June 23 Supreme Court case, the Trump administration’s policy is to “ignore the clear statutory command that notice and a hearing must be provided.”

In the case of Abrego Garcia, the administration sent the Maryland resident to a Salvadoran prison despite the fact that a judge had issued a legal order protecting him from deportation to El Salvador. The administration admitted that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a mistake but then openly flouted a district court order, upheld by the Supreme Court, to facilitate his return to the United States. The government finally brought him back, in June, only to detain him on federal charges of human smuggling.

The Trump administration has not released complete lists of people it has sent to offshore detention. The White House’s website features only partial lists of deported violent criminals, who represent a minuscule fraction of migrants in the United States. This is because, at its core, offshore processing and detention are attempts to hide people from public scrutiny, strip immigrants of their right to seek asylum, and normalize indefinite detention and even torture. They are forms of disappearance.

The point of these policies is not to deter migration or to save money: it is to put on a show of being tough on the border. The major question is whether national and international legal systems will consistently compel governments to follow their own domestic laws as well as international treaty obligations. Rich countries around the world are watching one another for policy models. If the Supreme Court’s June 23 decision on deportations to South Sudan opens the floodgates from the United States, it will likely start a global race to the bottom.

[figural]

"Theorist Grégoire Chamayou has described the contemporary paradigm of drone warfare as having instigated a “crisis in military ethos,” transforming the terms and terrain of engagement altogether as it proposes an unstable approach to acceptable targets. In an era of the global war against terror, Chamayou writes:

Armed violence has lost its traditional limits: indefinite in time, it is also indefinite in space. The whole world, it is said, is a battlefield. But it would probably be more accurate to call it a hunting ground. For if the scope of armed violence has now become global, it is because the imperatives of hunting demand it.

In this description, the remote killing characteristic of drone warfare is not just a safe or expedient means of carrying out war as before—this technical innovation corresponds to a new and rapidly shifting geographical model, where violence is no longer limited to demarcated combat zones but simply licensed by the presence of an enemy prey, “who carries with it its own little mobile zone of hostility.” State sovereignty and territorial integrity are contingent features of this model of warfare, and can be violated at will by an imperial hunter whose technical power and jurisdiction operates vertically.

The geopolitical layers of this methodology are many and complex: for example, the MQ-9 Reaper drone that killed Soleimani was likely launched from Qatar, but operated from Clark County, Nevada, where self-proclaimed “hunter” pilots proceeded to attack a diplomatically protected target visiting a third country with whom they were not at war—at least nominally. At the very least, this is novel; but the legal ramifications must be known.

As noted, Israel’s assassination of Arouri strikingly coincides with the anniversary of the Trump administration’s killing of Soleimani, which was justified in turn with reference to Bush Jr.’s extralegal innovations. But these Republican presidencies flank the drastic expansion of jurisdictionally ambiguous drone warfare under President Obama, whose office presumed authority to use lethal force outside of legally defined combat zones on an unprecedented scale during a “global” war on terror. These policies drew heavy criticism from international legal observers, as the Obama administration authorized more than 500 drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and beyond—locations where the situation, however grave, could hardly be described as one of armed conflict between organized groups. Lacking such criteria, the years of drone attacks around the world appear not only deadly, but illegal.

Even so, lawyers love an ignoble cause; and this remote assassin’s paradigm keeps many of them entertained. Legal scholar Michael W. Lewis argues that the application of international humanitarian law to the transnational deployment of drones constitutes an unacceptable constraint, where “it would effectively grant sanctuary to and confer an important strategic advantage upon unprivileged belligerents,” themselves apparently excepted from the protections of the Geneva Convention.

These are the sticking points of any legal theory of the drone, and the cause for which apologists must seek a portable state of exception, adhering to individual targets as they move about the world. Jonathan Horowitz and Naz Modirzadeh describe the seemingly contradictory situation of a “transnational non-international armed conflict,” where the law of armed conflict is analogized to a cloud, hovering above the head of an itinerant prey."

– cam scott, "israel's drone age"